Mistakes apparently were made – though he certainly didn’t delineate them.

“We have learned an important lesson,” he said.

Perhaps.

But New Yorkers still have no idea what really happened.

Three separate polls last week found that half of all voters think Spitzer is lying about the affair. A full 80 percent want him to tell his side of the story somewhere – just so long as it’s under oath.

Yet Spitzer didn’t discuss the scandal at all yesterday – except to try to excuse it: “We were fighting so hard for what we believed, that we let down our guard and allowed our passion to get the best of us,” he said.

What actually happened, of course, is that the Spitzer administration enlisted the New York State Police in an effort to destroy state Senate Majority Leader Joseph Bruno.

It doesn’t really matter whether that was an act of passion, or of calculation.

What does matter is that Eliot Spitzer needs to make clear just who ordered whom to do what, and when.

Then he can criticize President Bush to his heart’s content.

Spitzer cited Christian theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, who moved away from his pacifist roots to justify the use of power to right wrongs, using a balanced approach.

“Niebuhr understood that the exercise of power can be shocking and, at times, corrupting,” the governor said.

If Spitzer truly wants to take responsibility for his office’s “shocking” and “corrupt” abuse of power, he might heed other sources of Christian theology – such as the catechism of the Catholic Church, which embraces the notion of “an examination of conscience” and a full, sincere confession of sins.